The invention described herein relates to the general field of optical instruments called kaleidoscopes, but has improvement of form, shape, and construction which goes significantly beyond the existing state-of-the-art and thereby comprises a superior device that may be used both as an instrument providing relaxation and pleasure for persons of all ages and as a tool to aid designers of patterns for fabric and the like.
Kaleidoscopes of general construction commercially offered as toys for children usually employ a single sheet of mirror-surfaced metal, bent in a Vee and placed in a cardboard tube with end caps having suitable openings for viewing. The angle of the Vee is chosen so that the light from objects placed at one end of the tube will reflect back and forth between the walls of the Vee to produce a succession of images that appear to form a rosette pattern centered on the far end of the crease in the metal when viewed from the opposite end of the tube.
Generally also the far end of the kaleidoscope is fitted with a rotatable drum-shaped cavity having a translucent outer sheet and a transparent inner sheet confining therebetween small varicolored chips of glass, plastic, paper, or the like which when viewed from the opposite end of the kaleidoscope appear to form a colorful rosette. The rosette pattern can be changed and varied by rotation of either the drum or the whole body of the kaleidoscope so that the chips fall into continuingly different and new arrays.
While the patterns so formed are pretty to look at, their range of color patterns is fixed by the colors of the chips enclosed and their shapes and sizes. Interest is not long retained. In recognition of this limitation the more expensive kaleidoscopes have provision for interchanging the drum like section containing the colored chips so that new arrays and colored forms can be viewed. Some kaleidoscopes have a drum section that is openable so that the user can make his own selection of chip materials to be viewed.
The same deficiency is intrinsic in all kaleidoscopes of that type; the material viewed is limited. Even when the user makes his own chips, it is difficult to select materials that will produce suitable chips as regards color transmission and freedom to move and fall into continually changing patterns.
An interesting variation of the kaleidoscope, the so called "teleidoscope", employs two lenses, a large objective lens over the far end and a smaller eyepiece at the opposite end. This addition, in effect, transforms the kaleidoscope into a telescope and things at a distance are brought into clear focus. Within the cardboard tube is a Vee shaped mirror-surfaced reflective sheet of metal having a 90.degree. angle for the Vee. This instrument then produces three reflected images of the scene viewed through the teleidoscope, which holds some interest, but it is quickly recognized that the scene appears as a college of left-handed and right-handed images in which the many items being viewed can be recognized as standing upright, inverted, and left and right. Once these objects become recognizable the interest rapidly wanes.